urope." [Footnote: R. Blakey,
History of the Philosophy of Mind, vol. iv. p. 293 (1848). Fourier,
born 1772, died in 1837. His principal disciple was Victor Considerant.]
Grotesque as was the theoretical background of his doctrines, he helped
to familiarise the world with the idea of indefinite Progress.

2.

"The imagination of poets has placed the golden age in the cradle of the
human race. It was the age of iron they should have banished there. The
golden age is not behind us, but in front of us. It is the perfection
of social order. Our fathers have not seen it; our children will arrive
there one day, and it is for us to clear the way for them."

The Comte de Saint-Simon, who wrote these words in 1814, was one of
the liberal nobles who had imbibed the ideas of the Voltairian age and
sympathised with the spirit of the Revolution. In his literary career
from 1803 to his death in 1825 he passed through several phases of
thought, [Footnote: They are traced in G. Weill's valuable monograph,
Saint-Simon et son oeuvre, 1894.] but his chief masters were always
Condorcet and the physiologists, from whom he derived his two guiding
ideas that ethics and politics depend ultimately on physics and that
history is progress.

Condorcet had interpreted history by the progressive movement of
knowledge. That, Saint-Simon said, is the true principle, but Condorcet
applied it narrowly, and committed two errors. He did not understand
the social import of religion, and he represented the Middle Ages as a
useless interruption of the forward movement. Here Saint-Simon learned
from the religious reaction. He saw that religion has a natural and
legitimate social role and cannot be eliminated as a mere perversity.
He expounded the doctrine that all social phenomena cohere. A religious
system, he said, always corresponds to the stage of science which the
society wherein it appears has reached; in fact, religion is merely
science clothed in a form suitable to the emotional needs which it
satisfies. And as a religious system is based on the contemporary
phase of scientific development, so the political system of an epoch
corresponds to the religious system. They all hang together. Medieval
Europe does not represent a temporary triumph of obscurantism, useless
and deplorable, but a valuable and necessary stage in human progress. It
was a period in which an important principle of social organisation was
realised, the right relation of the spiri